Stellar Data Recovery Professional 9.0

Stellar Data Recovery Professional can help you recuperate data which you have lost due to multiple reasons, like accidental deletion and hardware failure. It supports multiple types of storage media, including hard disks, SSDs and SD cards. Likewise, it can extract lost data from NTFS, exFAT, FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. Unluckily, other file systems are not supported.

Despite the complexities of the processes going on “under the hood”, the application does not require any extraordinary skills from the user and, fortunately, there are guides to help you find your way. Like many other similar tools, Stellar Data Recovery Professional has a wizard-like interface, which means that you are taken through the recovery steps without much strain on your part.

The first of these steps consists of picking the file types you are willing to recover. In this respect, there are some preset extensions, like those corresponding to Office documents, emails, and multimedia. Moreover, you can add other less common extensions if you need to.

The tool supports two recovery modes: Quick and Deep. Depending on your needs, the time available and the nature of the loss, you can choose one of them. Although the deep scan is logically more accurate, it is excruciatingly slow. Once the results are ready, you can browse them by file type, tree view (which respects the original folder structure) or a list of deleted files. Good news is that the tool has a built-in preview feature for various types of files, like documents, archives and multimedia. It is also quite convenient that the tool lets you save the scan results, which you can load later to continue working with them.

I love the possibility of working proactively. This includes creating images or clones of a disk, from which you can retrieve a copy of any lost file. Unlike the usual scan, which is likely to find some unrecoverable data, this method guarantees a 100% recovery of the saved data. Likewise, it lets you create bootable USB data recovery media that you can use in case you cannot boot your system.

All in all, Stellar Data Recovery Professional can find and effectively recover lost data. There is a trial version, which allows scanning the drives and previewing file contents but does not let you save the resulting files. In addition to the Professional version, there are others you should probably consider: Premium and Technician. They let you do some things you cannot do with the Professional version, like recovering data from formatted partitions and unbootable systems, repairing corrupt video files or photos and retrieving data from RAIDs.